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It is always observed in the American States, that clearing the ground not only causes running springs to disappear, but dries up the stagnant pools and the spongy soils of the low grounds.
The pool over which the Arabs would have been ready to shed each others' blood was between thirty and forty feet in circumference, five or six feet deep, and contained little more than a foot or so of stagnant water; but, stagnant as it was, we drank eagerly of it. At the edge was sitting a huge frog, its sole living occupant, as far as we could see.
Yet so fond is he of his one enemy, that, when he can afford it, he builds him a fantastic summer-house over a stagnant pool or a slimy canal, in one corner of his garden, and there sits to enjoy the aquatic beauties of nature; that is, nature as he has made it.
Their utterly incurious indifference to Rachel in her peignoir at the window was somehow harrowing. The dank lane and vaporous, stagnant landscape were once more dead and silent, and would for a long time remain so, for though potters begin work early, colliers begin work much earlier, living in a world of customs of their own.
The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them. I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood.
It had risen slowly and surely from the green and stagnant water with the first light of morning, until it reached a little above the lamp-post tops; and there it had stopped, with a sleepy, sluggish obstinacy, which bade defiance to the sun, who had got up very blood-shot about the eyes, as if he had been at a drinking-party over-night, and was doing his day’s work with the worst possible grace.
Budlong, shocked and bewildered. For answer, Mrs. Budlong screamed the harder. "I know!" piped up Mr. Appel. "She's covered with leeches blood-suckers and can't get 'em off. I got 'em once swimmin' in stagnant water." When he spoke he called attention to the fact of his presence and that of Mr. Stott and old Mr. Penrose.
From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state, the Golden Age, of humanity, everything that helps to raise society by opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of authority to men's natural abilities, deserves to be welcomed by all who have the real good of their fellows at heart.
We can see, at our feet, the deep roadstead, foreshortened and slanting, diminished in appearance till it looks like a sombre rent in the mass of large green mountains; and farther still, quite low on the black and stagnant waters, are the men-of-war, the steamboats and the junks, with flags flying from every mast.
No attempt, apparently, had been made to clean or disinfect it; no sanitary precautions had been taken or health regulations enforced; hundreds of incredibly dirty and ragged Cubans some of them employed in discharging the government transports and some of them merely loafers, camp-followers, and thieves thronged the beach, evacuating their bowels in the bushes and throwing remnants of food about on the ground to rot in the hot sunshine; there was a dead and decomposing mule in one of the stagnant pools behind the village, and the whole place stank.
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